


The Half-Buried Cup

by tweedisgood



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Archaeology, Case Fic, First Time, Hand Jobs, Loss of Virginity, M/M, Male Slash, Oral Sex, Slash, Victorian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-04
Updated: 2012-10-04
Packaged: 2017-11-15 15:10:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,078
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/528609
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tweedisgood/pseuds/tweedisgood
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A case of antiquities, an  unconventional woman and two - no, make that four - unusual men.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Half-Buried Cup

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into Polski available: [Na wpół zagrzebana czara](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5224280) by [tehanu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/tehanu/pseuds/tehanu)



 

**************************************************************************************************

 

“You give me little reason so far, Mr Lanner, to think your problem is one I can solve, and none at all why I should find it an interesting exercise to try.”

Sherlock Holmes shifted his gaze from our client to me, disappointment and frustration oozing from every pore. Was it for this, he asked me silently, that you made me get up this morning, Watson? For this that you forbade me the smallest dose of consoling stimulant that might otherwise have made it worth my while?

Morton Lanner, a young man of such startling physical grace, fairness of features and other attractions of person that when he was first shown into our sitting room, I wondered if he were quite real, leaned forward and pressed his steepled fingers to his mouth, like a small child saying its prayers. The god in question remained unmoved. Broken spirits and contrite hearts he did not exactly despise, but what he really wanted was a mystery. Preferably an excellent one.

What I wanted was something for him to do. Anything. In accounts of my friend's singular character I have hinted at moods, at fits of inhuman energy followed by days of mute withdrawal. At times, he could summon them almost at will, could bend them to his purpose as he might an iron poker, feed his cases and starve his leisure so that his entire, extraordinary mind was put to work only when it was needed. 

At others, when his constitution faltered under the weight of self-punishment, the waters closed over him and he could not swim free for all his mental strength. He would take not to the sofa but to his bed, turning his face to the wall and refusing every offer of companionship or diversion. The day before, I had heard him mutter that he wished he could be dead and only come to life when there was something worth the effort of life. Such talk might have been only theatrics: but I preferred not to take the chance.

I preferred, too, not to dwell on the fact that he did not speak of a caring friend in the category of things that make life worthwhile. I had learned that long ago, and if the lesson needed repeating at intervals, well, I was doubtless a slow pupil. I would love him and he would absorb it, as a velvet drape takes the light, without acknowledgement but with a display of colour impossible otherwise. It was our way - our habit of use and garment of concealment.

The reader may understand my use of the word 'love' in any way he chooses: I ask only that he not be _naif_. For a _naif_ reader has, I fear, many surprises in store from this tale of mine. It may be that when my account finally reaches the light of day, decades or centuries hence, it will be _naif_ to suppose I mean anything but _eros_. I think the world grows less willing to deal in complexities, in subtleties of the heart, the more it admires them in science and machinery. That is a pity. I loved Sherlock Holmes long, long before I had the least wish to take him to bed, long before I could even form the thought of him in anyone's bed but his own.

Our client was a different prospect. He spoke of his late friend, a Mr Frederick Trease, in such immoderate terms of praise and affection that no-one could doubt he had been all the world to him, and I found myself thinking of certain volumes of poetry, certain medical texts, circulated carefully between people interested in…that sort of thing. Granted, he spoke of Trease's widow in nearly the same vein. Holmes bore the torrent of expressed emotion bravely, but when Lanner began to compare Mrs Trease to models of classical virtue and to quote Plutarch in the original, he held up his hand.

“It is no matter to me if she is Penelope, Marcia Philippa or both of them and the Blessed Virgin Mary combined. I repeat, why should I take on this case? You were promised a legacy and have been disappointed, that is all. The item may have been lost, destroyed or stolen, whether in Italy or en route to England. Mr Trease may simply have changed his mind.”

“Freddie would never have done that. Never. His promise was as good as a slave shackle.”

Holmes raised one eyebrow and looked sidelong at me. The eyebrow fairly shouted: _Freddie?_ It then proceeded to beg that if ever he should slip and address me as 'Johnny', I should forthwith have him committed.

“You should take the case, Mr Holmes,” insisted Lanner,“because it is surely not often that you are given the opportunity to go back in time.”

The cigarette that was already halfway to my friend's mouth halted in its journey. 

“Not...often, no,” he conceded. He lit up and sat back, eyes half closed. “Strictly speaking, not this time either I must suppose: however, please, elaborate.”

Lanner smiled as a fisherman does whose float has bobbed. He was not fooled, any more than I, by the show of casual enquiry. Holmes had taken the bait.

“Mr Trease was a scholar, an antiquarian, a fervent admirer of all things Roman. He passed his summers excavating in Italy, his winters in England in a house modeled in every way on the _domus_ of a Roman citizen of letters and property. Two thousand years pass in a moment, Mr Holmes, as one steps over that threshold. Every detail is as perfect, as authentic, as great love and greater learning can make it.”

“Your association with him?”

“Was that of pupil and teacher, follower and leader, acolyte and priest of the mysteries buried under the ground. We met the year I came down from Cambridge – just five years ago. I took a tour of Europe, visiting all the places of which I had read. The Greek philosophers and dramatists had spoken to my heart for years, and I passed many happy hours on the Acropolis, at orphic Delphi and fair Mycenae. I did not think so much of Rome in those days, but when I met Freddie Trease on the last leg of my journey – I had been told on no account to miss Pompeii, and he happened to be at the site that day – he opened my eyes. He showed me their works as he had uncovered them: how they excelled in so many manly arts and virtues. Greece had fallen before them, as I fell before him, quite conquered. He was a wonderful teacher and master – the model himself of those manly arts and virtues he esteemed.” He flashed us a perfect smile and smoothed down his yellow hair with a hand as small and fine as any lady's.

“And he was as taken with you?” Holmes set the man's overwrought way of speaking aside, though I sat open-mouthed. I have heard brides less effusive.

“He was kind; we became friends. I should not like to claim any more than that. I do not feel myself entirely worthy, even now.”

“Yet you think this legacy your right.”

Lanner seemed genuinely wounded by that.

“My right? No, no. I only want some keepsake, some small part of his great passion, of those dear days scrabbling in the soil, sharing what we found, discussing, debating – for he allowed me to disagree, he delighted in it: said that it was the only true way to learn.”

My friend sniffed and stubbed out his half-smoked cigarette before lighting another. “When one deals in speculation, perhaps. I prefer facts. Tell me the exact – the _exact_ , mark you – circumstances of the finding of the object in question and everything pertaining to it that happened after that. Do not edit or select. You may leave the interpretation to me.”

“All right, then. It was the summer of '91 – three years ago. I had returned every year since the first to assist him. We were both fortunate to have means that did not require our constant presence in England. He had secured permission from the authorities to survey, and dig, an isolated spot near a spring, the year before. It had turned up some roof tiles when ploughed. Freddie – Trease – was up to date with all the best methods. He found a magnificent villa, Mr Holmes, covered by the outpourings of the great volcano. It was hard work, hacking away at the shell of solid rock, gradually exposing the structure, taking care to mark everything as it lay before removing it. Near the end of the season we had reached the private rooms. Precious objects were scattered everywhere, stuck fast in the tufa.”

“On the day before I was due to leave – I was to attend a family wedding – he showed me the edge of a fine cup in green glass fitted with bronze. It had survived the blast somehow, though the cupboard in which it stood was turned to charcoal, and it lay on one side, gradually being uncovered. What could be seen already was decorated with a scene of two men feasting, drinking from a single cup in the same style as the one they adorned. There was something about it that reminded him irresistibly of the two of us, he said, and swore that if he was allowed to take nothing else for his pains, he would have this, and make it a gift to me. He even put it in his will. He died four months ago – the Ides of March, what irony – and when probate was settled, the cup could not be found.”

“A man may offer the Moon. It does not mean that he has it in his pocket,” Holmes observed, not unreasonably. “Is there any evidence that the cup left the site?”

Lanner sighed. “Not what you would judge sufficient. Trease planned to publish an illustrated account of the work when it was complete, but with his death...to tell you the truth, I expected him to give the remaining work over to another scholar, if he himself was unable to complete it; but he did not. I hear that the site has been abandoned. No-one knows what has happened to his notes, or where the finds have gone. It may be that his patron has them, but he has not replied to my letters.”

Holmes looked up sharply and his eyes narrowed, as if he could see on the horizon the distant figure of a promising complication. “The name of this patron?”

“The same Italian who granted him the land also paid for his workmen and tools. Signor Marco Figlio, secretary to the committee of the Naples museum.”

“He did not respond to your communication because he is dead, sir. He died late last year – which leads me to wonder why you did not know that.”

It did not occur to him that one might more fairly wonder why an English detective _would_ know, which is not to say that he did not enjoy the sight of us both gawping like flycatchers.

“Tut, gentlemen. I do read the papers, you know.” If by a definition of 'read', is meant 'mentally photograph', no doubt. “Mr Lanner?”

“This is the most difficult part of my tale. At the end of '91, Freddie Trease married. His bride was ten years younger than he, the daughter of Henry Parminter, headmaster of The Tallow Chandlers' School. It seemed to me – no, more than seemed, it was so – that our intimate friendship cooled from that time onwards. Naturally, when a man establishes his own household, for a time his interests turn away from people and places outside its walls. So, at first I was untroubled.”

Holmes nodded. Perhaps he was thinking of another friendship once pared to the bone in similar circumstances. I know now that he was more affected by my marriage than he ever let on. Just as a hard little place in my heart had never quite let go of another, far larger, sacrifice to things not shared, however glad I had been to see a crippled bookseller transform into a wounded wanderer, home from the hills – that is, so very glad that I fainted, as I have already written, and afterwards wept, as I until now I have not.

There are times, I think, when things are better left unsaid until they have brewed a little: until the bitterness is a savour that enhances, rather than a poison that corrodes, future peace. Lanner seemed to agree.

“Four times he declined my invitations to spend the afternoon at a sculpture gallery – a past-time that had delighted us in Italy. I wrote to him a fifth time after a gap of months, hoping that I had not somehow offended. He replied in the warmest terms and promised we should meet soon. We had lunch together and I fell at once to talking of the excavations. He regretted, he said, that for the coming summer he must be absent and perhaps the summer following too. He gave no reason, only that he had to stay in England.”

“After that, I dined at his house, several times; we met at lectures and exhibitions. All was affable, cordial. Yet never was it the same as before. My once expansive companion was full of silences, of fond looks cut off in mid-smile. His whole manner put me off making straight enquiries as to his health and happiness. When once we had shared every passing thought and impression, every enthusiasm and passion, I had a sense of a gate, closed and bolted from the inside. I was not sure how – whether – to try to open it. So you see, there is more than a missing cup at stake. I lost my friend, and longer than four months ago. Now I cannot ask him why.”

For some minutes Holmes sat silent and still as the Sphinx, his eyes closed. Our guest evidently suspected he had dozed off, but I knew better. Lanner nearly jumped from his chair when Holmes leaped up, rubbing his hands.

“Good evening to you, Mr Lanner. I believe I have all I need for now. Leave Watson the address of that slice of ancient Rome masquerading as an English home. I must go out.” By the time he had finished the sentence, he had seized his hat and overcoat and was halfway out of the door; by the time Lanner had quite recovered, it had shut behind him. Our client looked after him with shining eyes – how well do I know that look, I have seen it in the mirror often enough – brim full of delight and disbelief, affront and anticipation. Then he said the one word that I should, were I the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, think quite sufficient to set beside the words 'Sherlock Holmes.'

“Extraordinary.”

**********************************

I was asleep when Holmes returned, and just polishing off breakfast when he rose. He wandered into the sitting room in his nightclothes and dressing gown, preoccupied, already on his second or third cigarette of the day, and sat at the table only to read the paper. There was a single slice of toast left in the rack and I enquired if he was hungry. He started. For a fleeting instant I saw in his face exactly what Morton Lanner had seen in his friend's, or rather, an instant before: a gate closing; a bolt being slammed home. What was behind the shutters, I was not quick enough to see.

“We will set about the case at once,” he announced. “You are ready? Dust off the crumbs from your moustache, my boy; by all accounts it would never do to present yourself before Mrs Trease in a dishevelled state.”

He had been hunting, then, for information during the night before, for an independent view on Laura Trease and the Domus Concordia – the House of Harmony. Quite _out_ of harmony with its neighbours on a broad avenue in Highgate, solid yellow stock brick and stucco villas all, of itself it was a marvel of proportion and grace. We entered through a narrow doorway in the centre of a broad, whitewashed stone wall, a glowing ghost in the midst of a graveyard of smoke and grime. An aged porter, a morose, stooped wraith of a man who perpetually sucked air in through the prodigious gaps in his teeth, hefted a heavy woollen cloak over his bare head and around bony knees exposed by the short tunic of a Roman pleb, and left the consolation of his brazier to let us in. To the side, the porter's cubicle was chiefly occupied by a large, chained mongrel dog, lying on a mosaic floor bearing the famous legend _'cave canem'_. The grizzled beast sniffed at us, wagging its bushy tail; taking its duties just seriously enough to give a faint ‘wuff’ or two before settling again to sleep. 

The house within – rooms on two storeys arranged around an atrium that was partly open to the sky, despite the damp London wind that swirled across creamy marble and red tile – lay hushed as snow on Christmas morning. One or two servants padded in soft sandals across the colonnade, but they took not the slightest notice of us. The Porter, who rejoiced in the decidedly un-Latinate name of Barraclough, at last achieved the feat of sucking air through his teeth whilst speaking at the same time:

“Gentlemen, the household greets you in the name of Apollo, Minerva and the Lares.”

The broadest Lancashire accent I have ever heard took something away from the grandeur of it.

He bowed before a blue curtain across the long side of one room, swept it to the side and retreated, leaving Holmes to catch the material in one fist and us to duck underneath. We were thus already bowing ourselves as we entered the presence of Laura Trease: a significant beginning.

I do not think my friend has ever been subjected to such close and careful scrutiny. I, who am well accustomed to being nearly constantly observed – Holmes uses me to keep his skills sharp and I am glad to serve him so - had rarely seen the like. She was very still, the lady, perched on a stool that itself was raised on a dais and holding in one hand a spindle whorl filled with indigo yarn. In the corner of the room, stood a loom. Her age was hard to pinpoint, but probably no more than five and twenty. Her slender arms were draped with a heavy, black, Indian silk shawl shot through with silver thread. Otherwise she was the very picture of a Roman matron, in a loose and flowing gown caught up with a silk girdle and falling past her feet.

 _My gracious silence, hail_. The words sprang irresistibly to mind as I took in her serene brow, her glorious mass of dark hair caught up in an elaborate braided knot in exact imitation of the wall painting behind her, her soft and serious mouth. She lifted her chin just a fraction so that her gaze fixed Holmes full in the face. They stood thus for nearly a minute, neither of them speaking. There was a subtle, yet unmistakable, edge of competition about it. In the end she broke off, not by closing her eyes or turning her head aside but with a slow, satisfied smile. Serenity became beauty. She tucked the spindle away under her seat.

“Mr Sherlock Holmes. So you _are_ alive, after all. I had wondered. That is...interesting.”

Holmes reached into his mental bag of tricks and pasted on his most charming manner. I have seen women melt into cooperation with him after just a whiff of that silken, sympathetic tone and deferential pose.

“Madam. I had hoped to interest you in more than my existence. You are acquainted with Mr Morton Lanner?”

A cloud of discontent cast her face in shadow for a moment, but she only nodded.

“Has he visited here since your husband's death?”

“He has not.”

It was like archaeology. The ground was ungiving; progress would be slow; either great secrets, or nothing at all, lay underneath. Inch by inch, question by question, brief answer by brief answer, the two of them acted it out: the scraping trowel, the rare find, the making sense out of random walls and shards. I half-expected Holmes to explode in an irritated demand to tell him everything she knew and not waste time prevaricating. Instead, he appeared to relish the challenge of her reticence.

She claimed to know nothing of a cup, to have never set eyes on it, and to be as mystified as everyone else why, if her husband had meant to bequeath it, he had not taken care that it be kept safe. No, she had never met or spoken to his patron; it was possible he had the item and just as possible that he did not.

Holmes broke in on the silence that capped the interview once they had reached the bottom of the trench. 

“You have no liking for Mr Lanner, Mrs Trease. May I ask why?” He had seen it too, that faint, fleeting frown, and kept it in reserve until now: a sudden sally against the opposing force after the elaborate feint of straightforward enquiry.

“Why should I dislike a man I hardly know?”

She was sharp. Quick as a needle, blazing bright as a gorse bush in golden bloom, a sting in the tail – brains, hauteur and a whipcord retort. Living with Holmes had made me well aware how seductive a combination it could be – at first, a mental seduction only, but lately, since his return, there were sights I craved; there had been dreams I fled from. Instead of an inoculation, it had only made me more susceptible: not only to him, but to the same qualities in women, where before I had sought softness and sympathy. Watching the two of them, I felt like a voyeur at a peep show, as if between them, they amplified my wants and needs until my mind soared and, shame to say, my member thickened in my trousers. .

“It is my experience,” Holmes suggested,“that one needs to know a man profoundly to hate, or love, him. Dislike, on the other hand: dislike may arise from a habit as trivial as excessive coughing at the theatre, or wearing patent leather shoes. Things less tangible, even on mere acquaintance may rankle. The impression that a loved one has, in whatever sense, a suitor…”

An odd, a dangerous, way to talk to a widow about her late husband’s male friend, I thought, but she did not remark on that. 

“You've set me down as only a petty and jealous woman, then. It sits with your claim not to understand our sex: yet it is unworthy of logic, Mr Holmes.”

To my surprise Holmes only smiled, instead of prickling at her challenge, and if I had half expected him, like me, to wonder why she did not balk at the idea of Lanner paying suit to another man, he gave no sign of it.

“Fairly stated, Madam. However, I did not specify a particular loved one. Mr Lanner is by nature a worshipper, and not everyone craves worship. He made his excessive admiration for you, as well as Mr Trease, plain enough to myself and Dr Watson here. If he did half as much under this roof, however much trust there was between you, it might disturb the peace of your heart as much as your husband’s. One way or the other, I have seen it at the base of so many crimes.”

She sighed. “You speak of these things as an observer, with calculation, as if it were a self-evident matter of arithmetic. Subtract two from three: my husband loved me, so he could not have loved another; his dear friend admired me, so he must have become my husband’s rival. It is not a surfeit of love from which our present culture suffers, but rather a lack. Why subtract when one can add? ”

Now Holmes did look surprised, and I stood agog, wondering if she meant what my astonished mind took her to mean. Young as she was, girlish innocence, or ignorance, was not a quality I could discern in her.

She did not mind me, she had eyes only for Holmes. I could hardly fault that. If she was testing him somehow, I believe that he passed muster. His reply was dry, drained of socially acceptable outrage.

“A broad minded notion, Mrs Trease, but one that will win few adherents: I should be quite out of employment if no-one minded whom a person loved.”

“Oh, I am sure that greed and falsehood would remain, so too yearning and frustration, error and regret. And you are not, after all, here about a crime.”

“Indeed. We are here about yearning and frustration, error and regret, as you so succinctly put it. You may not care who loves whom. Is perhaps the case, however, that Mr Trease did, or that Mr Lanner still does?”

“Why not ask Mr Lanner? As I said, I have not seen him lately.”

It seemed that Holmes was about to press her to answer his first question, when in one of those swift changes of mood and purpose that caught – that continue to catch – me out with a tripwire of consternation and delight, he shrugged, murmured quiet agreement and turned on his heel with a crisp: 

“Well, thank you for seeing me, Mrs Trease. My sympathies for your loss.”

With only the shortest pause, just by the door where the old dog saw us on our way in return for a friendly scratch behind the ears, we were back on the street, back in a London that cared very much whom a person loved, before I could interrogate him.

“My word, Holmes, I have never heard anything like it: as if we had stumbled on some twisted triangle of illicit passion – and she so calm about it! What do you think?”

Occupied with picking dog hairs off his sleeve, he turned to me with that cool and chiding face with which he so often reined in my flights of speculation.

“I think,” he said quietly, opening his fist and showing me a slender cylinder that chinked as he tipped it on its end, “that I will revisit Mr Trease’s colleagues at the Royal Society of Antiquaries. He was a generous benefactor to many museums, and they never show everything they have to the public, you know. This,” he held it up for me to see, a tube of beaten silver in two halves screwed together, originally fashioned to hold a small scroll of paper, “was attached to the venerable canine’s collar. I doubt that it contains its name and address.”

“Hadn’t you better open it first?” I wondered “You’re sure it must contain a key?” 

“Humour me, my dear Watson. I am so certain that it contains a key that I am willing to wait until I stand at the very door of whatever locked room it opens, before unscrewing this container.”

It was less a room than a cupboard, but nevertheless, he was as right, as usual, as he had expected to be, as usual. In the farthest corner of the darkest basement of a large provincial museum that afterwards begged me not to so much as hint at its location, an ornate door opened with a secretive sigh onto a cabinet of curiosities so very curious that for moment I thought we had been hoaxed.

All the journey up, and the day before as he sent telegrams and paid suit of the most intellectual sort to curators and scholars, my friend had steadfastly refused to discuss the human drama that I thought we had uncovered. He seemed uncomfortable with the subject, not in the usual censorious way that our moral guardians the Press have of castigating ‘immorality’ without ever precisely defining it, but in a more personal fashion. Airy pronouncements about the frailty and foolishness of emotional entanglements – the more entangled, the more foolish – I might have expected. We might have bantered back and forth, as was our easy habit, about human nature and the supremacy of cold reason. That might have been that, and his discomfort put down to disdain. Had the cylinder not, after all, concealed a key, I might have continued to chew on the bittersweet confection that Holmes was, whether from inclination or choice, above all that.

The collection put paid to any such chance.

I had seen the odd “mucky” picture from time to time, circulated through dozens of sweaty palms and appealing, by and large, to the lowest common denominator; but I had rarely been one for frank pornography, preferring the soft yield of skin under the hand to the rustle of paper, another’s breath mingling with mine in a shared kiss. This was different. There was something so matter-of-fact about the massed bronze and terracotta phalluses – plain and anatomical, grotesquely large,ornate and festooned with bells, attached to soot-blackened lamps – here it is, the male organ, the source of pleasure and generation: you all have one, gentlemen, do not be coy, good luck to you! The curator, hovering beside us and clasping his hands in a nervous reflex, was quick to assure us that the Romans held them in reverent awe as ritual objects, charms to ward off the evil eye, certainly not fabricated for mere, er, gratification. It was only to guard against the ignorant and corruptible, to protect children and ladies’ sensibilities that they were kept back.

That’s as may be. He could hardly say the same of the scenes of coupling, of men and women upon beds, braced against walls, on hillsides surrounded by flowers and leaping spring hares, vigorously at their business in every conceivable position and a few that made me squint to work out how it was possible without dislocating limbs. Statues lifting their faces to a long-ago sky in ecstasy far more earthly than divine; fragments of wall paintings, lifted from rediscovered villas; bas reliefs and mouldings chasing each other in abandoned pursuit around abandoned dishes. 

Finally, tucked away at the back of a high shelf, a cup with two handles, green glass bound with bronze, wonderfully preserved despite the day of fire and the rain of ash. Just as Lanner had said, two male figures shared one drink, gazing in loving fellowship across the rim of a double- handed vessel the mirror of one they adorned, the scene doubled and redoubled, receding across time.

Holmes reached for it, turning it with reverent hands, inspecting it with just the fraction of a pause as he tipped toward his own lips as if to drink the vanished wine. He held the farther side up to the light. There, the same men – it was possible to believe these were individual portraits, so finely drawn were they, painstakingly etched onto the metal with supreme skill – hunted together on foot, spears in hand. The quality of the piece was undeniable, but what was it doing here?

It was only when he showed me the image at the bottom of the bowl that I understood. The older, bearded man clasped the younger to his bosom, winding the hem of his tunic around one muscular forearm, every sinew proud, exposing the youth’s body as far as the waist. With the other arm he reached down to pull his own garment aside. Both were in a condition of intense sexual excitement, the lover about to introduce his generous cockstand between the thighs of his beloved, who gazed at the weapon with parted lips and serene anticipation.

More than passion, more than lust: devotion, wonder and tenderness seemed to wind about the mannered figures. It might have been me, of course: I have never seen the point of desire without affection, and so am apt to see affection wherever I see desire. 

“Rendered more in the Greek manner than the Roman, I should say,” Holmes murmured, tilting his head towards me as if we regularly discussed the merits of erotic art over dinner at Simpson’s. 

“And Trease meant to give this to Morton Lanner?” I burst out, to a frown and a warning glance from my companion, for I had quite forgotten in my surprise that we were in company. Luck and distance smiled on me – our client’s name meant nothing to the official.

Back at the hotel, _sans_ cup – for though by rights it was our client’s, it seemed Holmes had not thought to obtain written permission to collect it for him – I asked him what his plan was and indeed why, having come so far to find Lanner’s legacy, he had not come prepared to take it away.

“…because I suspected we should find something very like what we did,” he replied patiently. “It is safe enough for now, and it is not yet clear to me whether we would do well by our client to give him what he asked for. Remember, I never did get an answer to my last question from Mrs Trease.”

My face must have been more than usually transparent to him, for he took one look and laughed aloud.

“Watson, Watson. I could have constructed your chain of thought from the bricks in my nursery. You observe Mr Lanner – his physical attractions, his feminine enthusiasms – and imagine him naturally receptive to the sort of advances that this gift might, in the eyes of some, represent. You take Mrs Trease’s words to be no more than bravado, or desperate loyalty, faced with the evidence, and with even more knowledge of her husband than she would willingly share with us, that he harboured some wants she could never satisfy, some affections that could not be had at home. Come, you cannot deny it.”

As it was, pretty nearly, exactly my chain of thought, I could not. His next words to me were razors, meant to be so, for laughter had died and in its place was disappointment.

“I, on the other hand, am inclined to believe her absolutely, and disinclined to judge Lanner a ‘nancy-boy’ solely by appearances.”

It was harsh, but I deserved it, and more than I thought he knew. I could look at men, at one man, and know the stirrings of both admiration and the flesh: but as long as I chiefly desired women, I could think of myself as something apart from the soft youths strolling around Charing Cross Station picking up trade, as more a man than the house tarts at school. I was a soldier and a gentleman and a hypocrite. There in the bottom of the bowl had been a scene that moved me: that attracted me. I had no business making assumptions about who else might feel the same.

“It is no easy thing to show a man something like that cup and ask him what he thinks it means to have it as a gift from one’s dearest friend. Fortunately, an application of logic may enable us to avoid that particular conversation altogether. Trease meant to give this to his friend _before_ he saw its whole message. Laura Trease accepts that he was capable of love, in every sense, for men as well as women or, at least, one man as well as one woman, and I see no reason to doubt her. It is possible that Trease changed his mind because he knew Lanner would find such feelings, or even their very suggestion, utterly unwelcome.”

“And instead of sharing that distaste, his wife resented Lanner for it?” I found myself by sheer force of momentum going along with the mad supposition perched on the back of his galloping argument.

“More than that: I think she had some Bohemian ménage-a-trois in mind, that they should all live together and share favours equally.” He shrugged. “A singular, but in the circumstances understandable, reason to take against someone – that they will _not_ defy convention and morality.”

He seemed so calm about it, so detached. ‘Convention’ I knew he dismissed as mere mental servitude. But did he really believe it did not matter if one was faithful to one’s spouse or not? What did he think about ‘love, in every sense’ between two men? Dare I ask?

“You may ask.” _Implication, I might get an answer I did not care for._ “And the answer you would get would be that I care for the truth, and for truthfulness. That I believe one should promise fidelity and stick to it, or do not promise it at all. Laura Trease told me the truth; I would be disappointed – in fact, surprised – if she kept it from her husband.”

After all, he was not quite infallible. He had failed to divine the second thing I wanted to know. So I thought. Truly, there are times when I see why Holmes thinks me a little dense.

He chose not to take me to see Mrs Trease a second time. She was hardly going to demand a chaperone. When he returned, his face had the look of a man who has conquered a peak but discovered another’s flag at the summit – just a little less achievement than he wanted.

“She knew, but she did not,” he announced as he hung up his hat.”The clue was the dog.”

“Yes, you found the key.”

“ _I_ did, but not Laura Trease. The hair of the dog, Watson. Not a trace of the perpetually shedding old mutt on her clothing, either time. She never handled the beast, did not find the key or wonder what it might be guarding: she really did know nothing about the cup. When I asked her how she guessed, even so, at Trease’s dual nature, she replied that there was nothing to guess: “I asked him, and he told me.” Extraordinary woman; extraordinary household.”

“Even so, you were right about her reasons for disliking Lanner?”

“It was herself she disliked, she said. For having once thought him worthy of love. She said she could not fault him on account of his tastes, for who can do that and be just? It was his lack of charity and sympathy that she could not bear.”

“Towards those with…unconventional affections?” I watched him closely as he lit his old briar and puffed away, drawing the flame through the tobacco. I wanted to know what he himself considered a just judgement on matters of sexual taste; whether he himself had any charity and sympathy toward men such as Trease... and me.

“Lanner runs a madhouse, did you know that? At least, he has some sinecure on the Board of Directors.”

The change of tack blindsided me for a moment. I could only sit with my mouth open, as I have myself once or twice seen mad people sit, transfixed by a vision entirely within their own mind.

“It is a small, private establishment in Fulham, owned by his family, which puts itself out as the last word in refuges for families cursed by insanity in their midst.”

“You mean for their unfortunate, afflicted relatives.”

“Do I?”

Holmes paced the room, agitated and brewing a temper. When provoked to anger, I explode: he stews, then boils over. I braced myself for the coming storm.

“Trease suffered from troughs of the deepest enervation and despair, when he could not rise from his bed and could speak to his wife only of the futility of existence. They alternated with months at a time when he came back to life, as she put it: full to the brim with good fellowship and enthusiasm for his one great love – the past.”

My friend turned and fixed me with an intense stare, in his eyes a clear question whether this was a picture familiar to me. Substitute detection for the past, and subtract the brimming good fellowship (Holmes himself would insist on that particular point of accuracy), and it was like a lithograph and its plate.

“It was the week of the funeral that Lanner wrote to The Times, in a joint letter signed by various of his fellow… keepers, stating that melancholia was quite enough reason even by itself to incarcerate a man. That same week I myself had a constant headache from the noxious fumes at the Smollett brothers’ warehouse fire and my doctor” – here he regarded me darkly –“forbade me the papers. Otherwise I would have made the connection much sooner.”

He threw his pipe at the fireplace, where it bounced rather than broke. Smouldering tobacco spilled onto the brass fender and missed the Turkey-rug by inches.

“The letter counselled against ‘timidity’ in families, argued that cases of unfettered mad people harming themselves or others should be laid squarely at the door of irresponsible and ignorant husbands, wives, parents, siblings. It was a _disgusting_ document.”

I tried, vainly, to pacify him. “People too often fear what they do not understand. Lanner has little experience of life: he may have been parroting what he heard from his elders; and he had no reason to suppose that Trease was anything other than perfectly normal.”

He bristled even more. “Normal? A thing is good or evil, tolerable or intolerable. What in God’s name has ‘normal’ to do with it? It is ‘normal’ in this great City for thousands of children to go to bed hungry every night, for people to make such a living as they can from dredging the sewers. I thought better of you than that, Watson.”

“I did not say I agreed with him,” I snapped, for once not feeling like playing the part of the loyal and humble servant. “You are angry with Lanner, you are taking this far too personally, and if you want to speak of ‘intolerable’ then blaming the nearest person for the faults of another surely qualifies. What happened to ‘pure, cold reason’, Holmes? If I were determined on normality I would not have come back to live here, with you. I had quite enough remarks from acquaintances at my club as it was – why, when I could afford my own household, I would choose to return to Bedlam? Yes, they said that, and I upbraided them for it. I never thought you mad, only unique. Life with you has been the crowning glory of my days, and in the years you were gone every time I walked along Baker Street I would have given my right arm to be able to open the front door, walk up the stairs and find you at home. ‘Normal’ can go hang.”

We were standing off, without conscious decision, facing each other across the fireplace. Somewhere in the middle of all that I had reached out and grabbed his arm. Abruptly, he drew it back, but the effect was to draw me closer rather than to pull away, for I was not about to let go. Every time I re-lived even the slightest portion of his absence I felt compelled to see him if we were apart, to contrive to touch him if we were together. 

Chest to chest, we stood a long while – a minute perhaps, but one is apt to forget just how long a minute really is. We were both trembling– with indignation, with fear, with uncertainty; with something nameless yet loud-voiced, all of a sudden demanding that it be heard.

“Crowning glory? Indeed?” A tiny smile plucked at one corner of Holmes’ mouth but his face was grave, his eyes searching mine. “I seem to recall young Lanner using just that phrase when speaking of his friendship with Frederick Trease. Fortunate, then, that there was nothing improper, nothing…abnormal in his regard after all. One could scarcely conceive of a more perfect example of a normal man than you, my dear fellow.”

This, then was the chance to speak up, to tempt fate. Oh, and a chance to prove Sherlock Holmes wrong which, to be frank, might of itself be temptation enough were there not so much at stake. If I was almost certainly not quite the man he thought me, better to start with that man and see how far the journey from image to reality.

“And the characteristics of this shining example of ‘normality’?”

He stepped back, my hand still on his arm.

“Regular habits, moderate indulgences, forgivable vices: the precise opposite of, for example, myself, in every way.”

“A thoroughly dull fellow, in short.” 

I was not entirely teasing. The setting for the gem, the backdrop to the drama: they fade, as they must, from the world’s excited gaze. They have no feelings on the matter. The ordinary companion of an extraordinary man is another case.

“Never. A _shining_ example, we agreed. You would not…trust me, when I say you would not want to be me, dear fellow. Be John Watson – be upright, predictable, and content.”

I dared: to this day I still did not know how, or why, except that the loud and nameless something was bellowing in my inner ear: *tell him*, fool, now or never speak of it again to a living soul.

“What if I were none of those things?”

He laughed, as if it were a real joke. “Shall we trade, then? I take drugs for boredom’s sake and not for healing. I have broken the law, many more times than even you can guess at. I despise sleep save as another drug to escape from the miseries of mental inactivity. I alternate starvation and feast. I flee from women and the joys of family as from my doom. You are a moderate smoker, a discriminating drinker. Yes, you are a little too fond of the horses and of attractive, affectionate young widows: but you are in no danger of penury or scandal. Tell me the darkest, most sordid secret from your past and we could probably print it in the Sunday papers as a comic and cautionary tale.”

I might have laughed myself, but the briefest image of a real and accurate article (and ensuing penury and scandal) flashed before my eyes. I gasped instead, which gave him some pause, but he continued to bait me in the expectation of some triviality that he could put firmly into perspective.

“Come, Watson, out with it. Walked home from the card table because you bet your cab fare? Caught in a latrine in the face of the enemy? Using the wrong cutlery in the Officers’ Mess? What was it?”

“Not what: whom. Murray,” I told him quietly.

“The orderly?” He turned more serious. A man who saves another’s life is ever after marked by it, as is the one he saves. Not all such wounds heal well.

I had mentioned the name and now he rose up before me: Charlie Murray, from a farm on the Borders. Sharp of mind and sturdy of limb; twenty two years old and already a married man – an unfaithful married man.

It was only when Holmes broke in that I realised I had spoken most of that aloud.

“How is that any fault of yours?”

_Fault? In that I drank in the lad’s awkward admiration, the fumbling advances, instead of brushing him off with a laugh and a comradely insult; in that I took advantage of his fear and mine: made it my excuse that a little pleasure and comfort must be squeezed from the bitter lemons of the hill country; that I stood braced against a field surgery table, the shorn hairs at his nape erect under my fingertips, shushing him as he gulped me down, shaking, both of us shaking, groaning under the burden of desire – that yoke so weighty, so chafing, so freeing. Oh, fault enough, dear fellow, fault enough._

“Watson?”

I was blushing beet red from shame and the heat of memory _give me my sin again_ and Holmes, seated in his chair before me, waited for an answer with every sense alert.

“I know that what I have to say will never leave this room.” His attention was a scalpel now, dividing skin, probing flesh, scraping down to the marrow of my bones. “Yet if I say it, this room becomes a different place, perhaps not one that can welcome me.”

He sniffed and examined his nails, almost offended. “For that to happen, I believe that the other occupant of this room would have to become a different man. I do not plan to. Say your say.”

A rush of gratitude became a rush of speech, offered before I withdrew to the safety of covering fire.

“Murray betrayed his wife…with me. More than once. Against military discipline; law; morality. I was indeed unjust to Lanner, the more so because of the two of us here I should know better than to think that a man who enjoys the touch of another man must behave like a woman.”

Holmes turned his head slowly and raised his eyes to mine, “how had I not known this?” written in letters an inch high over the space made by his open mouth. I waited for judgement. I was used to his disappointment, his ire, even a little gentle ridicule, but the thought of his disgust lurched in my throat.

“I cannot condone the betrayal, you understand; though it was his tie and not yours,” he said at long last, tenting his fingers and looking at them instead of me. 

“And the rest?”

He shrugged. “Military discipline? Soldiers are not made of tin; outside the line of fire, to be a man not a machine seems the only possible option. The law –well, I will not pry, but you may have broken it, as it stood then, or you may not. Yet you are not a hopeless reprobate as far as I can see. As for morality – I think we covered that already.”

I began to stammer my thanks, my wonder at his broadmindedness (I should not have wondered, he has the most… individual notion of the individual’s responsibility of any man I know), when he cut in.

“You did not mention nature, Watson. There are those who call it a sickness, temporary madness, even.”

“ ‘It’, Holmes?” Perversely, I wanted him to name the thing himself, to watch his lips form the words, he who spoke so seldom of love, of soft emotions, of desire. He did not – he is a master of waiting for the other fellow to crack – and I did want to speak of it after all, to lay the whole burden down.

“If so, I have been mad since I first knew what it was to desire anyone; if I am sick, I can hardly recall being well. I love women, I always shall, I think. But some men, too: some men move me with a power beyond my understanding, beyond law and morality into poetry. It _is_ my nature.” I did not add that one of them undoubtedly sat in the room with me now. “It may be hard for you to comprehend, Holmes; but your acceptance is all I need.”

I took the chair opposite him and watched as he continued to stare into the cats’ cradle of his thin fingers, twining and flexing around each other in tune with his thoughts. His face was all but closed to me. What he did eventually say quite surprised me with its insight.

“Do you find it a lonely life, Watson? To know that your nature is not precisely what the world expects it to be?”

He did not, then, as many in his place might have done, dismiss me as merely an ordinary man with one or two exotic tastes, hobbies that I might take up and put down as I chose.

“Sometimes. Occasionally one finds a kindred spirit – like Murray. Sometimes, one merely pretends for a very long time: pretends that one kind of connection, of intimacy, will do. I know that you yourself have no time for all that, but to me it matters a good deal.”

“No time…” He pondered that, a far-away expression giving him the look, suddenly, of a poet, or of one of the sages I’d seen in India, contemplating the world turned inside out and looking down from outside, at his place in it, at his face reflected in the stars.

“What happened to him – Murray?”

Of course: the last detail to be wrapped up first. I could tell him only what I knew, that by the time I was well enough to recognise a human face again, Murray had vanished back into the life that I was soon to leave behind for good. I never found out what ultimately became of him. Happy, I hope, somewhere in this world, or sleeping peacefully forever in undisturbed soil.

“Did you…love him?” Was it possible, he meant. Possible to love another man quite as thoroughly as one might a wife.

“I was fond of him, but love? No.”

“Or another, ever?” Another man, he meant. Not Mary.

Why did he want to know: to pour scorn on ‘love’ once again? Did he never get tired of that past-time? I made no reply. What was the point?

“Kindred spirits...” He looked wistful, all of a sudden, and I wanted to tell him that his friendship alone was enough to banish my loneliness forever. I wanted to, but I could not. Make no mistake, his friendship _was_ the crowning glory of my life. I believed, too, that he valued me, for what little services I could do him, as a setting that made him sparkle. Ungrateful, even greedy, to be lonely for want of more; and yet I was, and I could not bear to lie to him.

I leaned forward and patted him awkwardly on the hand. “Perhaps we are each, in our different ways, glad of company in loneliness?”

Quick as a mongoose on a snake, he caught my hand and pressed it on his knee. I nearly fell out of my chair.

“Watson, I wish you to understand…we are not quite as different as you suppose.”

It was my turn to gawp, though less elegantly than he always seems to manage it. From another, I should have taken it as a clumsy flirtation; but equally it might only be the clutch of a drowning man. I held very still, dared not say a word for fear of giving offence or putting him to flight.

“Years ago – ’77 it was, I had a case – Craven and Craven. They were publishers, with a dishonest employee whom I exposed. He had a profitable sideline in…certain specialist literature. Some of it fell into my hands and, reading, I was forced to face an unwelcome fact.”

That he was not as immune to the pull of the flesh as he aspired to be; for ‘specialist’ was surely a euphemism for ‘pornographic’ and probably ‘perverted’ as well.

“I had begun to suspect years before, of course. It seemed of a piece that romantic love was ridiculous, that women were a mystery, that preoccupation with both was a waste of time. I catalogued the details of men’s habits and vocations even as I evaded some of the reasons they fascinated me so much more than the fairer sex. But when I read those stories, I knew. The Diogenes club may be the queerest in London, but it is far from the queerest thing in the Holmes family.”

So. There it was, out in the light at last. I found I was not shocked, indeed hardly surprised and surprised, in all honesty, at not being more surprised. I imagine years of wishful thinking on my part had something to do with it: of wanting something enough that when it falls in your path, you only pocket it, whistling, and carry on with a millionaire’s confident stride.

Holmes looked up at the mantelpiece, clearly longing for a cigarette to calm his nerves – the hand still on mine was trembling – but offered me a wan smile instead.

“And yes, I have been very glad of some company in loneliness, dear boy.” 

“Was it so very unwelcome, then? To read, and know?”

“It was like…like a Cook’s Guide to a country that speaks a language that at last you understand. A Cook’s Guide, yet no tour to take you there.”

Had he ever found one? I thought not. My heart went out to him, even as a less noble impulse stirred. I had read such stories too, and lewd details of the gentle but passionate, or rough but willing, deflowering of a virgin man had my pulses racing and my cock at the ready like nothing else. Beneath his hand, I chanced a gentle squeeze.

“One might engage the services of a more experienced traveller. If such appealed? ”

Daybreak over Kandahar was never so glorious as the smile that showed him willing, that made him mine for the asking.

“The very thing, my dear Watson. The very man.”

He took my hand, leading me as if he, not I, were the guide, and we stepped into his bedroom, into the company of our fellow-criminals who watched in serried ranks from the wall. We might have been in Timbucktoo for all the notice I took of them or of the details of bed and chair, clothes piled on top of the chest of drawers, a clutter of clothes-brushes, matches and candle ends on the tallboy, my missing stethoscope hanging over the open wardrobe door – passing images in a dream.

Sensation, on the other hand, was wide awake, tugging at my sleeve-ends, muttering curses at collar studs and tasting of tobacco and fleeing innocence. So, I kissed my friend, kisses deep, slovenly and ravenous; took off his clothes piece by piece, pausing at every layer to touch him, shy at first, then bold; felt the fine, hard planes of his shoulder blades as he flexed and shuddered from the movement of my fingertips tracing down his spine, soft sounds of delight on his lips, loud in the hush of discovery and surrender. His voice…

Oh, dear Lord, his voice.

I had never heard him thus: yearning, sighing, transported. Sensation was king and we were its slaves. We could not for the life of us have disobeyed. Somewhere in the distance came the sound of footsteps approaching, a light, female tread that tripped, halted and recovered before fading away, away from the door that was not locked – that would never need to be, as it turned out, for there was more than one extraordinary woman in the world. Besides, what matter footsteps when Sherlock Holmes is devoting every ounce of his attention to unbuttoning your trousers? When he is begging you to tell him what you want, anything, dear boy, anything he has read – for he remembers it all, of course – or anything he has not read, anything, _everything_.

I had a brief, blinding fantasy of _everything_ , things I had done and never done. Of endless acts of lust and love: his prick in my mouth and mine in his; riding his narrow back with my legs astride his neat buttocks and my balls heavy against their soft skin, watching myself spurt; cradled against his chest like the youth in the bottom of the half-buried cup, about to pleasure his beloved between his thighs, an object of reverent wonder; of breaching him, this very night, his teeth bared in a wordless scream, right on the edge and over it, soaring, falling, dying under me.

What I actually _said_ was a little less elaborate.

“Clothes off. All of ‘em. Bed next.”

The human body is a work of nature’s art, and none more so than the naked form of a lover seen for the first time. Holmes I had prevailed on to eat enough over the years, but he would never be anything other than lean, just as I, when well, naturally fill out to the girth of a country squire. Ill-matched to look at, perhaps: perfectly paired when wrapped in each others’ arms, strength against sturdiness. We adored each other with our mouths and hands, worshipping the smallest feature –t he whorls of his ears, the corners of my moustache – and the proudest, most upstanding proofs of mutual desire.

Our two pricks standing to, sprung hard as bone, slid and shifted together as we rolled and wrestled, groaning at every contact. He caught hold of me first, experimenting with touches gentle and rough and, finding I liked rough best, frigged me soundly as I might myself, on a winter’s night when cold comfort was all that might be had. He all but brought me to a premature end before I stopped him, longing to drag this out just as far as humanly possible. 

I put his hand higher, where he could span and press at my rounded potbelly with his hands. He did it smiling, laughing as I wriggled and chuckled, ticklish with lightheaded happiness, sobering to kiss him again, skittering my own fingers along his ribs, whispering that I must feed him up more. At that, he dipped his head so quickly I could barely prepare for it, and brought me again to the brink with careful laps of his tongue, unskilled, tentative, stripes of novice praise. This time, it was he that drew back, wanting it to last, and held down my hips so I could not rise up to meet his mouth as it swept up the trail of hair from groin to chest, tasting sweat and salt.

My turn to feast, more knowledge giving me an edge – my thumb tracing the long divide, the seam in all our nether parts, along which half of humanity is split, and half is fused, where all the nerves, properly stimulated, serve to swell and tighten the parts around them, whatever their outward shape. Man, woman, neither, both (I have seen such). What matter? Sensation is king. 

Sensation: and affection. His balls I rolled in my hand – not too much, just enough to wake them to their fullness and leave him gasping my name. His rod I kissed and sucked with every trick of the tongue I’d ever learned. He spread his knees wide, begging me basely for more ( _such words_ : divine, coarse, inflaming beyond endurance), ordering me: and as I obeyed him I knew the old and ever-new joy of following him, of pleasing him, of falling into my proper place. For in offering myself to him, and those few things that I had, that I knew which he did not, something noble and fine would ever come to birth.

Noble, fine, and at its height glorious; and glory we came to unbelievably, almost together, like a cliché in the ‘specialist’ literature. I felt him try to hold it off, heels digging into the mattress as his whole body moved in time to the driving thrusts into my mouth, shallow and fast like his breath, catching, grunting as he came up to the point and stopped himself, ebbing just enough not to spill, not so much as to lose the bone-deep desperation to do it. He drove me mad with it, mad to take that iron control away, mad to lose my own. I fondled and pumped at my own member, conjuring images of spearing him, humbling him helpless. Yet he could never be that. Indeed the thought of him as he would be, ruthlessly commanding still, even as he submitted to sodomy and more, undid me at last, undid me just as he finally let go and we tumbled together into a jumble of lax limbs and damp sheets.

“Watson. _John_ , my God. That was…quite beyond what I had imagined. Quite.”

“Better?”

Speechless with panting for air, he favoured me with that patented look he has so often used to tell me I have yet again stated the obvious.

Presently, he pulled me up in his arms to lie against his chest, to rest there, his heart hammering in my ear, his left hand playing over my own heart as it thundered and then calmed to a steady beat. Blindly, he yanked at the top sheet where it hung, wrenched from its place, nearly to the floor and wiped us with it. I had the singular pleasure of watching him walk, stark naked, to his washstand and sponge himself quite clean, putting right his hair, his nails (I could feel their score-marks stinging on my flanks), his dignity. I made us a soldier’s bed of clean blankets, got myself as decent as I wanted – which is to say, not a great deal, for I saw the gleam in his eyes that meant I should surely be in disarray again before morning – and called him back to join me.

There were certain things to say and they were said. Certain confessions were made. Certain futures were promised in low voices and sealed with a solemn kiss. A lifetime later, I can say that we are well content with that conversation, and would have it again in a moment.

No, I do not think the reader needs to hear the actual words. Have I not been frank enough with what we did, that what we said must also be told? The privacy of men’s hearts is precious, and for none more so than my friend Sherlock Holmes. Only do not be _naïf_ , child of another age. We loved. All else is detail. Doubt my published tales; doubt this narrative; doubt the existence of Frederick and Laura Trease, Morton Lanner, the curious house at Highgate and the half-buried cup: but never doubt that I loved Holmes utterly and he, me.

We had arranged ourselves as comfortably as we might in the confines of his bed when a stray thought came to me out of the fog of exhaustion and satisfaction and I sat upright.

“What of the case, Holmes?"

He folded his long arms behind his head and sighed reflectively.

“Hmm, the case. Yes. Well, my dear Watson, there are things some people are better off not knowing, and the truth about that cup may well be one of them. I believe I shall tell Mr Lanner that I fear we may never get to the bottom of it.”

 

END

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks as ever to Athenae, for looking over an early draft of this work. By the way, I do know how to spell Timbuktu/Tombouctou, but Watson doesn't.


End file.
